De/Anti-Colonial African Education Futurities

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Introduction

George Jerry Sefa Dei, Wambui Karanja, Ephraim Avea Nsoh, and Daniel Yelkpieri

This collection of essays addresses the challenges, possibilities, and responsibilities for de/anti-colonial African educational futurities. Decolonization has become a buzzword of late so we must use with some trepidation. But what this book is getting at is the approach to dismantle colonial educational systems in Africa and to re-envision African education. This should be duly informed by our local cultural resource knowing, what we know ourselves from the grounded everyday practice of African educators. In other words, to learn from what educators know and are doing for the lessons in envisioning schooling and education in Africa. While we seek lessons and partnerships with others, African educators are urged to think through solutions to our own problems and challenges and meet the call of our times to provide education to young learners that not only empower these souls, but so they are able to design their own futures. So how do we do decolonial education from the standpoint of African educators and learners everyday schooling practice and knowledge? We believe a careful embrace of our African Indigenous and cultural knowings has a lot to do with our success in answering this question. We also engage both the decolonial and the anti-colonial with a reading that the “decolonial” (as many have pointed out, see Parry, 1994) is a process, in other words, the path toward an end, which is the goal of the “anti-colonial” (see also Dei, 2022).

Arguably, the search for new educational futures for Africa has become more pressing than ever before. This is in part due to emerging global educational challenges that demand that education responds to the needs of local specificities and global conditionalities simultaneously. There is an urgent need for a genuinely African-centered education that utilizes context-based knowledge and cultural resource material for local contexts to think through educational futures for Africa. This collection of essays is from scholars and educational practitioners who share their research ideas and findings of the theory and practice of anti-colonial education in African and African Diasporic contexts. The focus is on anti-colonizing African education (broadly defined) using the curriculum, pedagogy and classroom instruction as significant entry points. Among the questions posed are: How do we conceptualize decolonization in the context of African education? How do we link questions of Indigeneity, curriculum, pedagogy and instructional development? How can African scholars on the continent and counterparts in the Diaspora work together to bring professional and intellectual skills for pedagogic, instructional and curricular initiatives toward de/anti-colonial African education? What does it entail to address these educational challenges in contemporary times? How do we address questions of identity, setting target goals, incentivizing and promoting effective strategies for educational success through decolonized education? How do African and Black Diaspora scholars articulate relevance and debt to community?

The book is particularly framed within an anti-colonial interrogation of collective educational leadership, responsibility and accountability to address the invisibilization and marginalization of African Indigenous knowledges systems and to examine the critical role these knowledges can play in the decolonization of African education (see also Emeagwali & Dei, 2014; Emeagwali & Shizha, 2016). We acknowledge there are many paths to decolonization (Ndlovu-Gathsheni, 2015; Smith, 2012), and it is particularly important for educators to begin by grounding our de/anti-colonial projects in Black and Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies (see also Dei & Cacciavillani (2022); Dei & Lloyd-Henry, 2024). To reframe a decolonial education is to ask questions about omissions, negations, absences in school curriculum and classroom pedagogues, and how we provide critical comprehensive knowledge that accounts for the diversity of the human experiences, histories and ways of knowing. Decolonization, as many have noted, begins by asking new questions grounded in non-Western epistemes and Indigenous philosophies (see Dei, 2024a; Parry 1994). It should be a “subversive educational approach, not a superficial add-on, and requires actions to dismantle and rebuild” (see also Mihesuah et al., 2004; Hewitt, 2016). Decolonization is not about mainstreaming practice. In other words, a truly decolonial project cannot seek legitimation and validation from the dominant!

Our de/anti-colonial educational practices must be open and clear for all learners to see what educational agenda is being pursued. Long ago, Linda Smith (2012) asked us to acknowledge “the reach of imperialism into our heads” (Smith, 2012, cf. Jackson, 2019, p. 109). What this also means is to recognize the metaphoricity of decolonization as also about developing the oppressor consciousness and an awareness of “cultural invasion” (Freire, 2000). This is what Ngugi wa Thiong’o referred to when he long posited that we must be aware of the severity of the problem of colonization, particularly as it has to do with the colonization of “the mental universe” of the colonized worlds (wa Thiong’o, 1981, p. 16; Dei & Lloyd-Henry, 2024).

Thus, we need to rethink global partnerships in higher education, by moving away from the “catching up” syndrome. Conventional partnerships (human capacity building; student and faculty mentorship and training; staffing and physical infrastructure resourcing; collaborations in academic research; knowledge mobilization & field dissemination; etc.) are framed within this “catching up” mindset. There is clearly the perils and desires of global knowledge mobilization. Among the perils is knowledge appropriations in the global marketplace of ideas (i.e., addressing the control of “intellectual property” through restrictive copyright legislation that benefits the West, reducing a global sharing of knowledge, and the impacts on African scholarship). The race to internationalization in African education also suffers from an emerging class and gender-based privileges (e.g., how higher education rewards the proximity to “Whiteness or the West” and the access that such proximity affords). There is also the “educational sector imbalance” where resources are disproportionately allocated to certain fields (e.g., natural sciences, technology, engineering and management at the expense of the arts & humanities).

There is clearly an urgency for African education to move beyond Eurocentric models of global partnerships driven by an agenda of competition, rivalry, maximization of benefits, and the race to internationalization. We have much to learn from what Indigenous African communities themselves do around building sustainable partnerships of trust, respect, acknowledging respective strengths and contributions and to share power. Knowledge is power and global partnerships in African higher education must lead to our academies gaining power and recognition, as well as legitimacy and validation on our own terms.

Thus, we must disrupt the race to internationalization with an African-centered paradigm of global partnerships that deploy Indigenous philosophies to subvert colonial hierarchies of schooling partnerships and the imposition of colonial systems of knowing and practice. We must critically ask: What does “global” in “Global Partnership” signify? These partnerships signify asymmetrical power relations and dynamics that most often serve the interest of the rich and powerful (e.g., mantra of the West—“what is yours is ours but what is mine is mine”). But what does it take to move from Eurocentric to African-centered models of sustainable partnerships? In a forthcoming text (Dei et al., 2024) we highlight an “African ElderCrit” that espouse values of community, cooperation, mutuality, solidarity, interpersonal and intergroup relations as a derived and informed knowledge base.

We ask for a reframing of what makes for sustainability in education. Sustainability is about custodianship and authenticity. It is more than creating conditions for long-term benefit. Educational sustainability raises fundamental questions of how we conceptualize the Land (i.e., understanding “Land” as more than a physical space)—a site of knowing, inclusive of metaphors, ontologies, literacies of seas, waters, Earth and sky, and reclaiming our social, psychic, cultural and spiritual memories as “living forces” to learn from (see Dei et al., 2022; Simpson 2011, 2014; Styres, 2019). The Land and Earthly teachings of relationality, sharing, reciprocity, connections, mutual interdependence, building relationships, social responsibility and accountability can ensure livable, workable and sustainable communities of ethical learners and an idea of schooling as community (see Dei, 2008). We can also learn from the twinning of Indigenization and Africanization in a project of global partnerships in African education. It will mean to challenge the colonial appellation of “Indigenous” (e.g., African Indigenous does not have to prove its existence). It also means learning from the Cartographies of Indigenous across multiple geo-spaces—Africa, Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, Europe, United States and Turtle Island—ways to build sustainable global partnerships.

As editors, we do bring an intellectual and political project to this book in the articulation of an intersectional African-centered analysis encapsulating specificities of African education in multiple contexts informed by the African and Black diasporic experience and historical connections with the Motherland (see also Asante, 1991). We insist the examination of African education must have a global lens. It must also encapsulate Black education and the connections of Black and African identities and educational politics. Africanness, like Blackness as it is raced, is also a cultural, political and socio-historical construction, experienced differently on Black and African bodies, in different locations and geo-spaces. Issues of Black and African schooling and education intersect on a global landscape. Notwithstanding some specificities and uniqueness of the multi-geo-spaces, Black and African education share many considerations. In particular, the Black African experience in White supremacist contexts highlights the saliency of race and (anti)Blackness as lodged in skin color, body image and representation, culture, identity, and politics. But the Black and African identities are intertwined. So, we complicate understandings of Black and African community as complex, multifaceted, tensions filled, and contested, and yet still hold on to its political and spiritual force of coming to a collective Black African humanhood.